


Wolf Creek Lodge

by PragmaticHominid, Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)



Series: Bear Mountain Road AU [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Wrong Turn (2003)
Genre: Adoption, Found Family, Gen, Kid D, Kid Will Graham, horror movie au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:59:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 13,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27505711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/PragmaticHominid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent
Summary: Part II in a trilogy that combines elements of the WRONG TURN film series with characters from HANNIBAL.Having successfully escaped the clan of mountain cannibals with Will and D in tow, Hannibal seeks to obtain legal custody of the boys. Will and D attempt to adapt to the world beyond the isolation in which they were raised, while all three of them begin to better understand what life together as a family will look like.
Series: Bear Mountain Road AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2010217
Comments: 99
Kudos: 146





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all!
> 
> Here we are at the start of Part II of what has become a three part series.
> 
> Note before we begin that I'm opting to tag in the author notes at the start of individual chapters rather than in the tags. Feel free to let me know if there is something specific and beyond the obvious that you would like me to tag.
> 
> Other than that, I have a quick question for anyone who doesn't mind answering: Did you come to this series as a fan of HANNIBAL or WRONG TURN? You can let me know in the comments or answer this twitter poll: [Link](https://twitter.com/Pragnacious/status/1326471043834388482?s=20).
> 
> Thanks everybody,  
> \- Pragg

When Hannibal blacks out, just a couple miles outside of town, it doesn't come as much of a surprise to Will. 

Hannibal fell silent shortly after he finished laying out the plan for Will and D, and before he’d even stopped talking Will was aware that his arrow wound was bleeding again, and badly. 

He thinks that something must have gotten jarred around or busted when Maynard drove them off the road, but he doesn’t ask Hannibal about it. Will just watches, carefully, for the collapse that he has enough experience to see coming. 

By the time Hannibal’s foot slides off the accelerator and the truck begins to list off the side of the road he is sitting in a lapful of his own blood. 

Hannibal’s hand reaches for the emergency brake, then drooping like a dying flower falls short, but Will’s got it. They weren’t going very fast by that point anyway, and when Will pulls the brake the truck shudders to a stop halfway between its proper lane and the shoulder. 

Will has a choice then, and with the last strength that he can muster Hannibal turns his head towards Will and lifts his eyes to him to watch as Will makes it. 

He could leave Hannibal behind - bundle the still-sleeping D up into his arms and walk away from Hannibal and his careful expressions and his easy way with murder, away from the people-flavored meat sticks and the body cooling in the back of the truck and whatever else might be waiting at the end of the road Hannibal is taking them down, and either try to make it on his own with just D or else find someone more… normal, whatever normal even means, to take them in. 

Will doesn’t want to do that. 

Hannibal might be no less a monster than Will’s uncles, but Will is pretty sure he’s a safe monster, at as far as D and himself go. And Will, who still has Frederick’s dried blood on his hands, can’t yet imagine being able to fit in among any of the normal people that he’s lured in for death at the hands of his former family. 

A monster is what they need. 

And Hannibal likes D. Will thinks Hannibal likes him just as much, but the feelings that provokes are more difficult. 

So when Will gets out of the truck he does so to flag down help. 

Traffic here is sparse by most standards, but a thousand times busier than the road that Will is accustomed to hunting on, and within a few minutes he’s spotted an oncoming car. 

It feels almost unreal, stepping out into the road without any ulterior motives and waving his arms to stop the vehicle. 

It’s strange, too, watching the pair of oldtimers get out of their car and thinking what a disappointment it might have been to waylay them only yesterday. The old woman hurries to Will and amid a flurry of questions about what happened and if he is alright and where are his parents she tries to touch Will. He shies away from that, seeing her in his mind’s eye, bled out and dismembered in the shed, nothing more than stringy grey meat on brittle bones, and little of it. 

“I’m alright,” Will says, and then pointing at the truck says, “but Hannibal needs help really bad.”

The old man is peering into the truck cab with a worried look on his wrinkled face. When D lifts his head, blinking sleep from his eyes and looking around, the man yelps in surprise and takes a step back, and Will hurries around to the passenger side to haul D down into his arms and hold him close while the oldtimers take out a cellphone and call for help. 

There is, before very long, the howling of an ambulance’s sirens. Three strangers swarm out of the van and get down to the business of trying to keep Hannibal from dying while Will stands out of the way, trying to keep D from panicking at the wake of so much activity and noise and uncertainty.

It’s a small hospital, in the scheme of things, but it’s just about the biggest place that Will’s ever seen. The light that shines off the floors and the white walls beats against the sides of his skull, making his head swim with pain. 

They’ve already wheeled Hannibal’s stretcher halfway down the hallway when one of the strangers lead Will and D through the sliding glass doors marked EMERGENCY in tall red letters, and Will watches Hannibal and his collection of nurses or doctors or whatever they are disappear around the corner, and is torn between the desire to chase after them and the fear that doing so might bring some further calamity down on all of their heads. 

The hospital people try to put Will and D in separate rooms with separate beds, but the bright lit little rooms don’t have proper walls, just sheets hanging down from the ceiling, and as soon as the adults turn their back on D he ducts under the one dividing the two of them and climbs into bed with Will, who really isn’t feeling good now. 

The hanging sheet makes a whooshing sound as a pair of nurses enter the room, and Will watches the tall one come up short when she catches sight of D’s face, and Will snarls at her in turn even as the woman catches herself and tries to smooth things over. 

“Hey, little guy,” she says to D as she approaches the bed, speaking with a forced sense of good humor that Will thinks is designed to conceal her own unease, “you’re supposed to be in your own room.”

“I’m supposed to stay with Will,” D counters, and Will remembers, in an alarmingly fuzzy way, Hannibal telling them that it was important that they refuse to consent to leave the hospital without each other or Hannibal. “I _want_ to stay with Will.”

The nurses trade troubled glances, and Will knows that they didn’t understand a word D said to them - that to them it was just noises - and he says, “This is my brother. We need to stay together.”

“Okay,” the shorter nurse says, and Will can see that she is trying to pacify him but thinks that’s just fine. “You can stay together for right now, but after we finish check-in you’ll need to go back to your own bed. We’ll open the curtain so you can see each other, okay.

“Right now I need you two to change out of your clothes and put these gowns on, alright.”

Will takes the cotton shift from her dubiously, and D follows his lead and does the same. 

“Take all of your clothes off, everything but your underwear, and put them in that bag over there, okay,” the nurse says, and points to the trashcan in the corner that is marked in big bright letters, BIOHAZARD. 

Pulling anxiously at the hem of the shirt Will gave him what seems like an impossibly long time ago but which was only yesterday, D asks tentatively, “Will, my tiger shirt too?”

“He wants to keep his shirt,” Will tells the nurses. “It’s not dirty. It’s okay for him to keep it.”

The nurse tries to smile at Will, but she can’t hold the expression. It flickers on her face, and beneath it there is something that Will can’t name, something that he couldn’t even begin to put to words but that is in some way akin to both pity and disgust. 

It shames Will, and enrages him, and he’d like to jump out of the bed and claw at her face - to tear at her until she doesn’t have enough face left to ever look at him or anyone else like that again. 

_Don’t do anything violent,_ he remembers Hannibal saying, and tangles his fingers together in his lap to keep himself still. _Don’t hurt anyone. Will, this is the most important thing; if you hurt anyone, they’ll separate you from D. They’ll have you arrested, and I’ll have a rough time getting you back._

“Just put it in the bag with the other stuff and we’ll figure it out later, okay,” she tells Will. “We’ll be right outside if you need any help!”

“Will?” D says. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, everything is okay,” Will says, putting forth his best effort to hide all the doubts that are sloshing around inside of him. There are so many people here, and Will does not know how to keep them from running roughshod over him, and that comes with so many bigger implications than a lost t-shirt.

“Lets just do what they want and then we can go and find Hannibal,” Will says, but when he slides of the bed to stand so he can change the world begins to swim and stutter around him again, and he drops the hospital gown on the floor and brings his hands up to the sides of his skull, biting back the need to whimper - to scream maybe - at the pain inside his head. 

“Will?” D asks, and then more frantically as Will slides bonelessly to the floor, “ _Will!_ ”

As though from underwater Will hears D cry out, “Help! Hannibal, help!” and he tries to say that it’s alright, that he just needs to sleep this headache off, but he doesn’t know for sure if he really said these things out loud or just thought them, but if he did then neither D or the hospital people pay him any mind, because now there is a flurry of activity surrounding him. 

Things come to Will in blurry, disconnected pieces after that. 

There is the sensation of being picked up by someone much bigger than himself, and Will looks up at the face above him and tries to decide if it is Jed or Hannibal or someone other, but his eyes will not focus on the face floating up there so far away, so he gives it up for a bad job and closes his eyes against the probing of the hoard of hands that seem to surround him as soon as he’s put down. 

Against his will someone peels back an eyelid and shines a blindly bright light into his eye, then moves on to do the same to his other eye, and at the same time someone is washing the dried blood from his face and giving the gash in his forehead, which stopped bleeding some time ago, a closer look. Somebody mutters, “Christ, he’s got lice!” and another voice replies tiredly, “What did you expect?” and behind all of that Will can hear D whimpering. 

Will turns his head towards that last sound, and opening his eyes is able to focus, briefly and woozily, on his brother, who has retreated to the other bed and who is watching him with wide eyes from the other side of the open curtain. 

“It’s okay,” Will tries to tell him, but then they are rolling, the chair he was sitting in gliding over the glaringly bright floor at dizzying speed, and it takes Will perhaps half a minute to be able to say to himself, _I’m in a wheelchair now._

Will doesn’t understand most of the things that happen to him after that - the x-rays and the examinations and the inserting of an IV into his arm and stitches into his forehead, but somehow he is back in bed and D is standing beside him, gripping Will’s hand between both of his own, and Will tries to tell D that he thinks maybe he saw one of the oldtimers from earlier in the hallway, but D shushes him goes on staring at something above and beyond Will, and Will turns his head towards the droning of a voice that he’s only just noticed, and manages to make his mouth say, “What?” in response to the man in the white jacket who is standing over his bed. 

The man smiles down at him in a way that Will imagines is meant to be reassuring, and says again, “You have a minor skull fracture and a concussion. We’ve given you some medicine that will help but that will probably make you very drowsy very soon. 

“Your father is in surgery and will…” but before he can try to figure out what that means or hear the rest Will falls asleep. 


	2. Chapter 2

Will wakes up in a strange bed in a strange room. 

D is sitting next to the bed in a big brown leather chair, kicking his dangling feet idly while he stares up at the TV bolted to the wall, and eyes drawn to the motion Will sees that D is wearing new shoes - new everything, point of fact, head to foot. 

When Will moves to sit up in bed, D cries, “Will!” and bounces to his feet, the cartoons moving across the bright screen forgotten. 

Those cartoons unnerve Will. 

He and D have watched videos together on stolen laptops and cellphones, and the uncles had an ancient VHS-TV hybrid that they would sometimes dig up to play a movie, but never has a cartoon looked as bright and fantastical yet nauseatingly real as they do now. 

The walls around him are no better. They’ve been painted a dizzying array of vibrant colors that make Will’s still-aching head pound just from trying to look at them. 

The window is a source of relief. It’s dark on the other side of it, quiet and cool-looking, something apart from the bright lights and chemical smells of this room, and Will focuses on it until he feels more clear-headed. 

“Where’s Hannibal?” he asks, sitting up a little straighter. 

When Will moves he feels the pull of bandage tape against the back of his hand and a faint sting, reminding him of the IV needle that is still under his skin. Will doesn’t like that, so he pulls it out. 

“He’s upstairs in his own room. That old man took me up to see him, and I guess he’s doing alright.”

“What old man?”

“The one from the car.”

Will says, “I thought I saw one of them in the halls earlier, but I wasn’t sure. I’d figured they went on their way.” 

“He said that they wanted to come back here and see if we were alright.”

“Yeah?”

“They mostly just sat around and waited with me until the nurses let me in here,” D says, vaguely uneasy from something in Will’s tone and trying to pacify him. “Then after a little while they decided that the woman should go to the store and get us some stuff…”

D raises his arm to point at a plastic bag sitting on the counter by the sink. “That’s for you.”

“What did they want?”

“Dunno,” D says, on the verge of sounding troubled. “The man mostly wanted to talk to Hannibal, and was waiting around until the nurses would let him. He was mad at him - the man was mad at Hannibal, I mean. 

“Hannibal let him be mad, for a little while, and he told him that he was right to feel that way but that his target was wrong. He said…” 

D sputters to a stop, fidgeting his hands and struggling to parse a conversation that Will doubts he could fully follow, but then he goes on. “I guess it boiled down to is that Hannibal said that he wasn’t our daddy or any kind of kin to us, but that he was working on taking responsibility for you and me.

“Hannibal talked at him for a while, and the man calmed down, and after that the old folks left, and Hannibal talked the nurses into letting me come up here and sit with you.”

Will wants to say,  _ Good. I’m glad they’re gone, _ but bites back on the impulse. Whatever instinct drove those strangers is too foreign for Will to trust, but he thinks maybe that has more to do with himself than the oldtimers, and he doesn’t want his own bitter suspicions to sour the thing for D. 

Instead, he keeps his voice as neutral as he can when he asks. “They treated you alright?”

“The man was really nice,” D says, and Will remembers watching the way the oldtimer jumped when he saw D look out the truck window at him. “I couldn’t tell with the woman… It felt like I worried her.

“But there was something I noticed,” he goes on, and now the worry is plain in him. “They didn’t understand me when I talked. 

“Nobody here does, Will,” he goes on. “They just look at me, and they blink, and then they either try to guess at what they think I want or tell me to go sit down."

Beneath the quilt, Will’s hands ball together, squeezing like they’re closed around an invisible neck.

“The problem is that they aren’t listening right,” Will tells him. Then he adds quickly, “I want to go see Hannibal. Where is he?”

D brightens, pleased at the prospect. “I’ll show you.”

Will skirts around the shopping bag the oldtimers left behind like it’s a snake that might bite him, but when D glances back and sees that Will hasn’t brought it along he frowns and darts back into the room to tuck it under his arm before zipping out again.

The gleaming floors cold under his bare feet, Will follows him down the empty hallway. 

  
  
  


D leads Will down quiet halls that were so crowded earlier that day, pleased by his own daring and eager to show Will how much he’s learned, and when they step onto the elevator he proudly pushes the button to take them up to Hannibal’s room. He laughs at the surprised look on Will’s face as they start to rise, even as his own stomach lurches giddily. 

Then they are in the hallways again, D matching his pace to Will’s as his brother, as though expecting ambush, keeps low and cleaves to the walls.

“He’s up there,” D whispers, deferring to Will’s caution, and because they are coming up on the closed door so quietly they hear the strange voice coming from the other side. 

Hannibal says something that D can’t make out, then the door swings open and a man steps into the hallway, and D has just enough time to register his blue uniform before Will jerks him through the bathroom door and out of sight. 

D tries to say something, and Will hushes him sharply. 

“That was a cop,” Will says, and D sees the fear shining in his glassy eyes. 

It’s not the first cop D has seen today, and he reminds Will, “Hannibal said that he’d have to talk to the police. He said that wasn’t something that he could help.”

“I know it,” Will says. “I guess I knew that, but I got scared.” 

“Do you think we’re going to have to talk to the police too?”

“Dunno,” Will says, peeking out the door to see if it’s safe. 

D stretches to look over Will, and through the cracked door he sees the cop retreating down the hallway. The man moves like someone who's been worn ragged, and there’s a smear of blood across the back of his uniform. 

The cop rounds the corner, and Will says, “Let’s go.”


	3. Chapter 3

Hannibal is busy reading over a stack of papers when the boys slip into his room. 

He’d been perched on the edge of his bed, but now he stands to greet them. “My discharge papers,” he says, gesturing with the pages. “And yours as well, Will. I was just on my way down to get you. We’re leaving momentarily.”

Will gives him a hard, studying look. “Are you well enough for that?”

“My doctor expressed a similar sketism,” Hannibal answers. “I’m well enough, Will.”

“What was that cop doing in here?”

“It’s a good thing you missed him - he’s had a dreadful day, I’m afraid, and is in an absolutely awful mood.”

Will listens closely as Hannibal explains how he spoke with the police as soon as he was out of surgery and lucid enough to do so, as he’d already warned the boys he would have to do, telling them about the body in the back of the abandoned pickup and spinning a carefully curated version of what happened on the mountain. 

“I almost felt bad, sending the officer who spoke with me up there,” Hannibal goes on. “He and his colleagues walked headfirst into a bloodbath, and I don’t mean just what Wasco did to them. When they start to count the bodies up there this is going to be an international scandal.”

There’s a lot about that to make Will anxious, but before he can think through it Hannibal adds, “I’m afraid they got your uncle, Will.”

“He’s dead too now,” Will says, and when D’s breath hitches and he reaches for Will’s hand Will clutches on too. “I figured it would go that way.”

“Oh no,” Hannibal says. “They took Wasco alive. 

“The man you saw in the halls was the partner of the individual I spoke to early. The latter didn’t make it, I’m afraid, nor did three of his colleagues. It seems your uncle put up quite the fight.” 

There’s pride in that for Will, despite everything, but it doesn’t drown out the fear. 

“Are they going to hurt him?”

“They may, but probably not to the extent that he and his brothers hurt others. And down the road we might be able to do something to improve his situation.”

Placing all of this to the side, Hannibal continues, “I’ve spoken to my lawyer and the state child protective services as well.”

“And?”

“The CPS is woefully underfunded and understaffed, while my lawyer suffers no such disadvantages, should we encounter any roadblocks. But once I laid out my credentials and voiced my personal investment in your situation, the woman I spoke with was very encouraging.

“It’s going to be a process - there will be meetings, court hearings, and doubtless mountains of paperwork - but I think it will work out in the end, and for the time being I have you both through the weekend.” 

  
  
  
  


Hannibal rests on the edge of the hospital while on the other side of the bathroom door Will changes into the set of clothes that the elderly couple bought for them. 

Will grumbles something, but the only part of the sentence that Hannibal can make out is an emphatic curse. 

“You alright in there?” Hannibal calls out, just loudly enough to be heard from behind the door.

“Fine,” Will says, but shortly. He didn’t want to take the clothing the elderly couple bought for him, Hannibal knows, though he isn’t sure if Will is offended by what he might perceive as charity or if they did something more specific to earn invoke his ire. 

“I hope those nice people left their contact information,” Hannibal goes on. “I’d like to send them a thank you gift, in the very least, for saving my life.”

“ _I_ saved your life,” Will says, the anger in his voice barely muffled through the plywood door. “Me and D and Wasco saved you. Those two just showed up at the end, after it was all but over.”

The bathroom door might have slammed against the wall if not for the benefit of the door stopper. Instead, the door swings back hard and hits Will in the shoulder, provoking a yelp that is more frustrated surprise than pain. 

“None of this fits!” he says, walking with evident discomfort towards Hannibal, the new set of shoes held in one hand, and Will is right about that, of course. Even as stick-thin as the boy is, the jeans, the legs of which stop short of Will’s ankles, clearly pinch, and the shirt isn’t much better. It’s so tight that it’s limiting the range of motion around his shoulders, and its started to hitch up just from the short walk from the bathroom to the bed. Will jerks the hem down angrily. 

“They envisioned you as being smaller than you actually are,” Hannibal tells him. “That’s inconvenient now, but in the larger picture not necessarily a disadvantage.”

“I can’t even get these shoes on my feet,” Will says, and the outrage in his voice is beginning to take on a whining tone that reflects his age, “and the jeans are making my belly hurt.”

Most of this, Hannibal knows, has nothing to do with the ill-fitting outfit; Will is on the edge of a breakdown, probably one of many. More tears will be a necessary step if Will is to even begin to process everything that has happened to him and that he has seen happen and that he has done, but Hannibal is himself feeling less solid on his feet than he has pretended, and for now he tries to forestall them. 

“Never mind,” he tells Will. “A driver is waiting for us in the parking lot. Once we’re on our way I’ll order a few things that fit you better and have them delivered to the hotel directly.”


	4. Chapter 4

To say that the hotel is the very best that the area has to offer is, Hannibal feels, the epitome of damning with faint praise, but despite his own discontent with their lodgings he is aware of how the place’s counterfeit opulence overwhelms the boys, and so he shepherds them through the halls and into their own suite as quickly as he himself can manage. 

They stand in the center of the small kitchen, looking around dazedly, while Hannibal goes to the refrigerator and peers inside before moving on to look inside the shopping bags sitting on the table. He’s pleased to find that everything he ordered is there. 

When he turns his attention back to Will and D they are still frozen in place - seem, in fact, to be afraid to move - but at last D ventures, “Is this where you live?”

“No,” Hannibal says. “We’ll just be staying here until certain legal issues have been sorted out.

“It’s fine for you both to look around,” he assures them, “but in a few minutes I want you to shower, and then we will need to take care of the lice situation.”

He adds, “Your room is through the living room and to the right.”

They venture forth, D tugging at Will’s hand to hurry, and disappear around the corner, and when Hannibal hears D say excitedly, “Is that candy?” he knows that they’ve found the mints left on their pillows.

“Looks like it,” Will answers. 

“Can we have it?”

“Sure,” Will says, but a bit nervously, like he’s anxious that he’s giving away something that wasn’t meant for them. 

  
  
  


When Will and D find Hannibal again he’s moved into the bathroom, and is laying out clean changes of clothing for the both of them on the sink countertop. 

Along the edge of the tub he’s lined up a regiment of bottles and bars, and D tries to pay close attention as Hannibal tells them what each one is for, the bar soap and the tea tree oil body wash and the shampoo, but beside him Will is getting impatient. 

When he picks up a lime-green bar of soap and a small metal thing with a hooked end and explains, “This is lava soap. It’s for your hands only, but use it and the nail pick to get everything out from under your nails. Will, I especially want you to be careful to -”

“We know how to use a shower,” Will breaks in. 

“I don’t,” D contributes, rather meekly. The bathtub at the homeplace has been broken longer than D can remember, and they’ve always just washed up at the water pump, but D is conscious enough of Will’s already wounded sense of pride to avoid saying that much.

Hannibal doesn’t push back against Will but he doesn’t back down either. “There are reasons I’m being specific, Will," he says. “Look at your hands.”

They both do as Hannibal said. Will has washed his hands at least a couple of times since they got to the hospital, but maybe he didn’t do such a good job, because D can see something rust-colored hiding in the wrinkles around his finger joints. It’s under Will’s nails, too, that rust-colored stuff. 

D knows exactly what that stuff is, and he has a pretty good idea about where it came from too. 

“I can still smell the blood on your hands, Will,” Hannibal continues, “even from over here. That blood can be traced back to its owner.”

Will is red faced, and D isn’t sure if it’s shame or anger that has him that way, but he says, “Give them here then.”

Hannibal hands the soap and the pick to Will. 

“I’ll be in the other room if you need something,” he tells them. “After you’ve gotten dressed we’ll need to do the lice treatment, but that’s more easily managed over the sink.”

When Hannibal closes the door behind him, Will says, “You want to go first or should I?”

“I want to,” D says. “Is that okay?”

“Sure,” Will says. “Just let me figure this out.”

D undresses while Will fiddles with the shower. First the water roars into the tub but then Will works out how to make it come out of the shower head, hissing down like the hardest and heaviest rain D has ever seen. He turns one knob too hard and then jerks his fingers away from the flow, hissing. 

“Scalding myself on this thing…” he mutters, but eventually he finds a good temperature, and he steps back to let D climb inside before closing the curtain to keep the water in. 

The idea of it was a little scary, but now that he’s in the shower D doesn’t want to get out, the warm water feels so good against his weary body. 

He looks down at his bare feet, and sees the way the water melts the dirt off him, even before he starts to scrub, the murky grey water flowing down the drain. More dirt washes away when he rubs the shampoo into his hair, little bits of leaves and other debris that had been stuck in it going along with it. 

The soap smells fresh and clean, and the tea tree oil body wash that he uses last makes his skin tingle. 

After he’s done washing up he just stands under the water, letting it flow over him, until Will says, “You okay in there?” and D, says, “Yeah, but it’s too nice to want to leave.”

He does, though, feeling a little guilty for hogging the shower for so long, and Will passes him a fluffy white towel that’s big enough to use as a blanket and says, “Be careful not to get too much water on the floor.” 

“It feels like my skin is _breathing_ ,” D tells him. 

“Look at you,” Will says, and his smile is wide but there’s something in his voice that’s almost painful. “All washed up and good as new.”

D takes that literally, and all bundled up in the oversized towel like it's a cloak, he steps in front of the mirror and looks. His dark hair is standing up and pointing in every direction, and D thinks that’s funny, but... 

But mirrors have started to worry D in a way that they never have before. There are mirrors everywhere, it seems like, down here off the mountain, and shiny surfaces that are clean enough that they reflect D’s face back at himself almost as good as a mirror. He’s hasn’t even been away from the homeplace for a full day, but he’s already seen more faces than he can remember seeing in his entire life up until today - dozens and dozens of faces - but none of them have looked like the face he sees reflected back at him in the mirror now, and he’s relieved when the steam from Will’s shower fogs it up. 

Still wrapped up in the towel and holding another to give to Will when he’s done, D puts the lid down on the toilet and sits on it to wait for Will to finish with his turn under the water. After longer than D might have expected, Will turns off the water and reaches out to take the towel him. 

Will’s skin is rosy when he steps out of the shower, but there are hectic splotches on his face that makes D think that he’d been crying in there.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s a good day, all told, that first lazy day in the hotel room. 

In fact, Will thinks it might be the best day of D’s life, or at least the best day he’s had since Will stole him, and he knows that his brother doesn’t remember anything of the life he had before that. 

There’s a bitterness to that, watching Hannibal provide them both with so much more than Will ever managed to scrounge up, and all while barely seeming to even have to try. The sense of his own inadequacy that provoked brought him to tears in the quiet isolation of the shower, but Will is trying his best to hide those feelings and to focus instead on everything that is new and good about their situation. 

There are so many new things to enjoy, really, and Will doesn’t want to bring D down.

So Will changes into the new clothes, which fit like a dream, and follows Hannibal’s instructions when he drapes a clean towel around Will’s shoulders to protect that new clean shirt and has him bow his head over the kitchen sink so Hannibal can scrub the lice treatment into his scalp. It burns, but not too badly, and Will waits it out until it’s time to rinse. 

When that’s done with, Hannibal sits Will down in one of the kitchen chairs and begins to work the tangles out of Will’s damp hair. It’s a tricky process, since it’s been a while since Will thought to sit down and brush through his curls, and inevitably the comb snags in his hair. 

Will has been sitting absolutely still, out of fear that fidgeting might agitate Hannibal, but when the comb jerks to a stop Will can’t help but shy away; it’s only a small pain, but there’s a great deal of precedent which leads Will to expect tiny hurts to be followed by big ones.

Hannibal’s hands withdraw, taking the comb with them. 

“My apologies, Will,” he says, and Will blinks, entirely unsure about what to do with that. Hannibal gives Will a bit of time to steel himself before starting again, and this time he’s put the comb to the side to focus first on working through the bigger knots with his hands. 

Those hands are big - they are big and strong enough to break Will to pieces easily - but they are agile too, and the fingers and palms are peculiarly soft and free of calluses. 

The gentleness of those hands, throughout the long process of working through the tangles and then combing his hair out, is as alien to Will as the apology. It occurs to Will, while Hannibal pins his hair up in sections, that nothing like this has happened to him before. 

_ My Mama took care of me, _ a voice inside Will’s skull asserts in argument, as Hannibal presses with the tips of his fingers to turn Will’s head to the side, repositioning it. _ I’d be dead if she hadn’t. Maybe Wasco did too, back before everything got so bad. _

But those memories are long gone, if they ever existed, and nearly every recollection he has of being touched by Maynard or his uncles is marred by pain or the potential of pain. Jed with his clumsy hands, always grabbing too hard, always yanking or shoving without any real understanding of the harm he caused, or the way Soncy had of causally cuffing Will across the face when he was under foot or didn’t move fast enough to do something that he’d been told to do. The half-silly, half-malicious efforts Wasco would make to rile Will up by pinching him or pulling his hair, and Maynard… 

Will doesn’t want to think about Maynard right now. 

Hannibal has begun to comb through his hair with a fine-toothed lice comb, deftly removing the nits and the poisoned lice, and suddenly Will is struck by an epiphany. 

_ I’m being taken care of, _ he thinks.  _ That’s what this is, _ and his child’s heart leaps at the idea, yearning towards it with a desperate hunger. 

Then he is crying again, and does not understand why. 

It’s not shame this time, and the tears are not spurred on by a sense of having done poorly by D. He’s crying for himself now, though he barely knows that. 

D is beside him in a matter of moments. “Does it hurt?” he asks, his eyes darting up at Hannibal suspiciously before returning to study Will’s face. 

“No,” Will says, fighting back against the need to cry harder - to break down sobbing, maybe. 

Rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand, Will forces a smile and says, “It doesn't hurt at all.”

  
  


When Hannibal hands Will the room service menu he does so as a begrudging concession to his own wounded body. He would much rather have cooked for the boys himself, to see personally to their first real meal on the first full day of their sojourn out from the wilderness, but he is simply too weary. 

Instead, he contents himself with studying the two boys as they browse the menu, D leaning over Will’s shoulder while Will reads its offerings out loud to him, pausing occasionally to ask D to work out a word or sentence himself. 

Will’s pronunciation is on occasion creative, and most of the dishes are clearly unfamiliar to him, but Hannibal is nonetheless impressed by how quickly he rattles off the text. It’s been evident from the beginning that Will possesses all the raw making of a savant, but Hannibal feels comfortable assuming that the boy has never seen the inside of a classroom, and he’d wondered if Will could read at all. 

It seems that Will is not only literate, but has been working to teach D - who seems fairly bright himself - to read as well. 

“What’s that word?” Will asks D now, point to something on the menu, and watching while the smaller boy focuses on working it out Hannibal finds himself returning to a cold winter’s day when he’d written Mischa’s name in the snow for her, drawing the letters almost as tall as she was, and encouraged her to sound it out. She’d been nearly three years old then, and Hannibal eight, and he’d despaired of her ever learning to read. 

“Flies?” D offers, with a frown that tells Hannibal he knows he got it wrong. 

“Close. Remember that it’s a food and try again.”

D squints at the menu and says questioningly, “Fries?” and when Will looks back at him and grins affirmingly D’s own face becomes full of awe. 

“We can get fries?” he asks, almost in a whisper, and before Will can answer D’s head jerks towards Hannibal, who can see the fragile hope burning in his eyes, and repeats, “We can get fries?”

“Today you may have whatever you’d like.”

D shakes Will by the arm. “Did you hear that?” he asks. “We can get fries.”

“I heard him,” Will says. “Don’t shake me around, okay? My head still hurts something awful.”

Will casts his eyes up at Hannibal. “What’s the little v next to some of these things mean?” 

“Vegetarian,” Hannibal tells him. “Those items do not include meat.” 

Will looks back at the menu. “The mixed garden salad, then,” he says, “and fries.”

“Please,” D chimes in. 

“Yeah. Please.”

“That’s fine,” Hannibal says, “but add at least one more thing to make it a more substantial meal.”

Hannibal watches him scan the menu. “Caprese Panini sandwiches, maybe?” he asks, a bit tentatively. “Please.”

  
  
  


They’ve had fries before, but only as cold leftovers scavenged from the bottom of fast food bags. It was a rare treat, especially for D, when they found a few old fries in one of the newly stolen cars, but nothing has prepared either of them for how good fresh French fries are. 

The outside crunches when Will bites into it, but on the inside it is soft enough to melt in his mouth. Next to him at the table, D is nearly fidgeting out of his own skin, body swaying and legs kicking back and forth in barely bottled up delight at the meal before them. 

It’s unusually challenging to leave D the majority of those fries, given Will’s long-standing rule of making sure his little brother got enough before taking much of anything for himself, but as soon as he turns his attention to the salad Will is almost as enamored with it as he was with the fries. 

“It’s mostly just leaves,” Will says to Hannibal, for the sake of conversation, speaking around a mouthful of lettuce and tomato, “but there’s something about it that my body feels like I just  _ need _ .” 

“Vitamins,” says Hannibal, who for his part doesn’t seem to be eating much. “And nutrients. You’re malnourished, Will.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Will says, carefully stabbing some more salad onto the end of his fork. The uncles weren’t much for silverware, but Hannibal seems to expect that they use it, so Will is doing his best to pretend that he’s used to eating that way. “It just feels like my body needs it.”

“You should have more fresh vegetables with your dinner,” Hannibal says, and that’s what Will does. 

When dinner rolls around, Will and D order another salad to share between themselves, and more fries too. At Hannibal’s suggestion, they add a veggie tray with red pepper hummus, too. Avoiding meat for reasons that aren’t quite clear, even to himself, Will rounds it all out with a grilled cheese, while D tries a tuna melt. 

By the time dinner is over with and the leftovers stored away in the fridge, Hannibal looks beat. He’s exhausted, obviously, and from the way he moves Will thinks that the arrow wound is really starting to talk to him. 

He goes to bed early, retreating into his room and closing the door behind him, and Will and D go to their rooms too but they don’t go to sleep. Instead, they sit up together in their big bed, dressed in fluffy white hotel robes and eating cookies from the minibar, and watch two Disney movies in a row on the big screen tv. 

It’s only after D falls asleep that Will starts to really worry. 

Throughout the day, Will has tried to accept the situation as easily as D does, to simply enjoy the good and have fun, and aside from the two crying jags he thinks he’s done a pretty good job at that. But the entire time there’s been a nagging voice in the back of Will’s skull, insisting that none of this can be trusted. 

When D’s good natured stream of chatter is replaced by his habitual wheezing snores, the voice in Will’s head gets loud. 

_ This is too much, _ it tells him, again and again.  _ It's all too much. He wants something else.  _

Alone now, the lights from the city below them filtering in through the curtains dimly, Will starts to get worked up about the idea of what that something else might be. 

Suspicions that Hannibal didn’t plant sprout up in the dark regardless, and Will sits up for a long time, mulling them over. 

Eventually, Will gets out of bed and, quietly, lets himself into Hannibal’s room.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guy, real quick - content warning for discussion of child sexual assault on this one. It's nothing specific or detailed, but Will is talking around the edges of some trauma here.

The rustle of the stiff hotel quilt wakes Hannibal.

There is a moment, extremely brief, in which he contends with a sense of disorientation, an uncertainty as to his surroundings. 

He places himself first, recalling the subpar hotel bed and the circumstances that brought him to it, and then he makes sense of the slight form that has crossed the darkened room to lay down in the bed beside him. 

Hannibal feels a moment of personal dissatisfaction with himself, paired with a vague sense of unease that Will was able to slip into the room and get so close without him waking. 

At first he thinks, _Nightmares,_ but just as quickly Hannibal rejects the idea. If intangible fears crept up on Will in the night, he wouldn’t come looking for comfort from an adult he as of yet barely knows. He would have cleaved closer to D, utilizing his own reluctance to upset the smaller boy as a means of bringing his fears to heel, and remained in their bed to keep watch. 

Therefore, Will is here now because Hannibal is the thing that he is frightened of. 

Hannibal reaches out and clicks on the reading lamp. 

The boy is lying on his side, head propped up beneath his arm, which is extended towards the headboard. The light has caught him reaching towards Hannibal with his other hand, as though he intends to touch his chest. 

That hand falters now, hesitating. Hannibal catches the hand, as carefully as if it was a small bird, and returns it to Will’s side of the bed. 

He looks back at the boy, who is glaring at him with a wounded kind of defiance that is clearly waiting for a reason to tumble down into hatred. Will, Hannibal thinks, looks as slim as a blade of grass and almost as fragile. 

“Are you looking to screw me?” he asks. 

Hannibal keeps his face carefully neutral as he moves to sit up against the headboard. Will also sits up. 

“What provoked your question?”

“My Papaw - Maynard - told me, back when they first started using me for bait, that any grown man that tried to take me off the mountain was only out to screw me.”

 _Prime him to fear outsiders,_ Hannibal thinks, _further isolation from anyone who might interfere._

He asks, “Do you know what that word means?”

Shame bleeds into Will’s face, mingling with the stubborn defiance, and that strange mixture alarms Hannibal more than anything that has happened so far. 

Will breaks eye contact with Hannibal, and cheeks flushing red against his otherwise pallid face, he says, “I know a few things.” And then, so quickly that he is tripping over his own words, he says, “And I can learn, I don’t care, I just want to know -”

“Will,” Hannibal says, without any inflection. The smallest sign of rage or disgust now would be easily misinterpreted, and he schools his expression into neutrality. 

“I’ll do what you want,” Will says, with a sudden strange calm. Later, Hannibal will learn that that particular type of serenity tends to overtake Will when he is on the verge of tipping over a dangerous precipice. “I don’t care if it hurts, but D has to be off limits, and he can’t know -” 

Hannibal says Will’s name again, and the boy falls quiet, worrying his lower lip between his teeth. 

Trauma reactions are to be expected, given the boys’ history, and Hannibal is neither especially surprised nor angry - or rather, he’s not angry with Will - but it is important, now, that he be exceedingly clear. 

“I’ve no intention of screwing you,” he tells Will. “I don’t want that from you - not you or D. You don’t have to worry about that.”

Watching Will closely to see if the boy is able to believe that, Hannibal notes that his eyes are glassy with tears again. _There is a breakdown coming,_ he thinks, not for the first time, _but probably not tonight._

“There is one thing that you can do for me,” he goes on. 

Will’s breath hitches in his chest, but after a long moment he says guardedly, “Yeah?”

“Don’t use Maynard as your standard of measurement for what to expect from me. I’m nothing like him.”

“Alright,” Will says, but Hannibal sees a shadow cross the boy’s face, and knows that his suspicions were correct. He is glad all over again that the old man is dead, but only wishes that he’d had some time with him first. 

But contending with things that Will is not ready or able to say now is not a task for tonight, and instead Hannibal says, “There may be difficult truths that D needs to be protected from, down the line, but that won’t be one of them. 

“Go back to your room. We have important meetings in the morning.”

  
  


The meeting with the social worker goes well. 

Hannibal anticipated difficulties - the need to charm, threaten, bribe or perhaps kill to clear a path between himself and legal custody of the boys, but the pieces continue to fall into place with stunning ease, as though it was meant to be from the beginning. 

The boys themselves make it easier. 

They are both shy with the stranger, but whereas D refuses to look at the social worker when they are introduced, and quickly retreats behind the couch to watch the woman from hiding, Will spends the entirety of the meeting staring as though he is imagining the process necessary to dismember her. 

They are disconcerting, the two of them, though D doesn’t intend to be, and that combined with the tremendous expenditures that will be needed to address their many medical problems and contend with the traumas they have experienced hardly make them desirable candidates for foster care or placement in a group home. 

An offer from a well-monied psychiatrist to take responsibility for their care comes as a blessing. Indeed, the social worker tells Hannibal, “Bless your heart,” at least four times over the course of the meeting. There’s a degree of condescension in her tone, but Hannibal is happy to accept that little indignity if it means getting his way. 

By the time she says her goodbyes they have a court date and a path forward towards legal custody. The only real drawback is that they will be expected to stay in the state until things are resolved, but that’s a hardship Hannibal can manage. 

As soon as the door closes behind the social worker Will walks over to the fridge. He can’t be especially hungry, as they only just ate breakfast an hour before, but he understands the comfort that comes from a well-appointed larder. 

He opens the door and looks inside as Hannibal, still thinking of the easy praise the woman heaped on him, says, “I’ve never been so blessed.”

Will snorts and pokes his head out from around the fridge door long enough to say, “She was making fun of you.” 

Returning his attention to the contents of the fridge, he goes on, “She thinks you’ve bitten off more than you chew, and that sooner or later it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass, but she’d rather it be you than her.” 

“Well,” Hannibal says, “passive aggression is better than most of the alternatives.”

“Sure,” Will says. He’s relaxed, now that the social worker is gone, more chipper than Hannibal has ever seen him, and he knows that stems both from their conversation the night before and the reassurance that, at least for the time being, no one will try to take him away. “You want something to eat?”

The next few days pass easily. The boys are happy, and eager to learn more about their recently expanded world, and Hannibal watches and learns himself as the pair of them begin to understand who they are when not under constant threat and hardship. 

The two of them seem to be adjusting so well that, when the explosion finally does come, Hannibal is nearly blindsided by it.


	7. Chapter 7

“Why do your hands feel like that?” D asks, squirming as Hannibal rubs the suntan lotion on his back.

“Like what?”

D tries to crane his neck around to see Hannibal’s face. “Soft!” he says, and when that doesn’t turn Hannibal mean he decides that it’s alright to lift a hand to his own mouth and giggle behind it. 

“I used to be a surgeon,” Hannibal tells him. “I’m still in the habit of taking careful care of my hands.”

From beside them, Will says, “That’s a kind of doctor, right?”

“Yes,” Hannibal tells him. “Now I’m a psychiatrist. A different kind of doctor.”

“That Frederick Chilton said he was one of those too,” Will answers. “A psychiatrist.”

There’s a note of something that D can’t quite parse in Will’s voice, and he looks to his brother to try to see if anything is wrong, barely hearing when Hannibal answers, “Frederick was a psychiatrist only in a technical sense.

“Come here, Will. It’s your turn.”

Will goes, and stands a lot more still than D managed to do while Hannibal rubs the lotion on his back and shoulders. D watches Will, trying to decide how he’s feeling - how he’s  _ really  _ feeling. 

His brother has been relaxed and happy over the last week, most of the time, but he’s also been crying more than D’s ever seen, and D himself doesn’t have the emotional maturity to consider that that might be a good thing. 

“You understand the rules for the pool?”

Will scowls at that, but D repeats, “Don’t run or push, don’t go into water deeper than up to my chest, come out when you say it's time to leave.”

Then he asks, “You aren’t going to swim?”

“Not today,” Hannibal says. “Injuries like the one I received last week need to be kept dry.”

There are less than a dozen people in or around the pool, but for the boys that still constitutes a nearly unprecedented crowd. Intimidated as soon as they’ve passed through the doors leading to the outdoor pool, D hesitates. 

Will stops too, but not for the same reason. 

“That water doesn’t smell safe,” he says, and D thinks that’s a good point; even from here, the chemical burn of the water makes the inside of his nose sting. 

Back on the mountain, there’d been a small pound that could get up to D’s waist after it rained, and sometimes they would splash around in that, but they never swam in the creek. There were chemicals in that water, Will told him, and that was what put the tumors on the fish that Maynard sometimes caught. 

“What you smell is chlorine,” Hannibal tells him. “It keeps the water sanitary to swim in by killing germs. If you get it in your eyes it may sting a little, but as long as you don’t swallow it the water is completely safe.”

D, who is fully reassured by Hannibal’s tone, barely registers the words himself. 

He is looking down the paved pathway and into the sparkling blue water, where three older boys are splashing around in the deep end. They have a huge, multi-colored ball that they keep throwing to one another or spiking down into the water to make a splash. 

D watches the three boys and the ball, so entranced that he barely draws his eyes away from them as Hannibal points out the steps down into the shallow end of the pool before taking a seat in one of the plastic chairs nearby. 

“Come on,” Will says, tugging on D wrist to lead him into the water. 

It’s chilly, despite the warmth of the day, and halfway down the steps D squeaks and says, “That’s cold!”

Maybe he said that louder than was polite, because the splashing at the other end of the pool halts suddenly. D glances that way, and sees that the boys have stopped wrestling and are staring in his direction, the ball floating forgotten in the water beside them. Some of the adults are watching him too. 

“Sure is,” Will says, as though he’s noticed none of this. “Come on now. We’re going to have fun,” he adds, but D doesn’t think he sounds very convinced. 

D hops down the last step, bringing him into water that comes up to his chest, gasping at the chill even as he enjoys the buoyancy the water gives him. 

Tentatively, he bounces up and down, bringing his arms down hard on the water to make a splash, and Will shields his eyes and laughs in a way that almost sounds real. 

That encourages D to splash around more, and it is fun, though when he gets a little bit of water up his nose it stings something awful. 

“See?” Will says, as D glances back at the boys on the other end of the pool. They’re talking to each other, but D can’t hear what they’re saying. “We’ve just got to get used to things like this, and then we’ll like it. That’s why Hannibal brought us down here.”

“That boy’s coming over here,” D says. 

“Stay here,” Will says, and wades out into the deeper water to meet him. 

D glances over his shoulder to Hannibal, trying to see if any of this is alright, but he doesn’t look back at D. Hannibal is, D thinks, watching very closely while also working hard to avoid looking like that’s what he’s doing. 

“How old are you?” the stranger asks Will. 

“Twelve,” Will tells him flatly.

“No way,” the other boy argues, but without much heat. 

Looking back and forth from them, D almost grasps his objection; the other boy seems so much bigger than Will, and not just taller but more fleshed out. Looking at them from across the pool, D thought the boys were older than Will by at least a couple of years, but now he wonders if this one is Will’s age, or maybe even younger. 

Will doesn’t answer him, but he tries to straighten his shoulders and stand a little taller. From behind him, D sees the crooked knobs of his spine pressing outward against his skin. 

“Do you want to play with us?” the stranger asks. 

“No,” Will answers. “I’m watching my brother.”

The other boy gives D a long, measuring stare. “He can come too. I guess,” he allows, looking back to Will. 

“No,” Will repeats. “We don’t want to play with you.”

The stranger looks a little hurt at that. Then he looks angry. And then he shrugs. 

“Whatever,” he says, turning away slowly against the drag of the water. “Y'all are weird anyway.”

D felt disappointed when Will refused the invitation, but watching the faces the trio of boys pull when the stranger rejoins them makes him feel sick with mistrust. 

“You alright?” Will asks him. 

What D is feeling right now is too big and ugly and complicated for him to even understand, let alone put into words. Instead he says, “I wanted to play with that ball. It’s real pretty.”

“Maybe I can figure out how to get you one.”

“Maybe,” D repeats. He  _ does _ want the ball - is fixated on it now, point of fact - but it’s only a proxy for other things that he doesn’t know how to ask for but that he suspects are even harder to obtain than a brightly colored toy. 

“Never mind them,” Will says. “We’re having fun.”

And for a while, they do. 

Will dog paddles from one side of the shallow end to the other, while D is happier just to lift his legs off the bottom of the pool and float, moving his arms to spin himself in lazy circles. 

When the beach ball hits D on the back of the head it does so with a lot of force, but it’s too light actually hurt, and for a moment he doesn’t understand what hit him. 

Then he sees the ball, floating in the water next to him, and hears the stranger tearing through the water in pursuit of it. D lunges for it, pressing the ball to his chest possessively, and then the bigger boy is on top of D, his momentum and weight dragging the both of them under the water. 

All fantasies of the colorful ball discarded, D scrabbles desperately for the surface and comes up howling and terrified, the chlorine burning the inside of his nose and deep into his sinuses. 

The bigger boy has backed off and is watching, scared, as Will scopes D up and carries him to the edge of the pool. Hannibal is there, standing on the bottom step and beckoning Will towards him with words that D can’t hear over the sounds of his own wailing and the thudding of the blood in his ears, and when Will passes D to him he sees that Hannibal slipped out of his shoes before he waded into the pool, but that his socks and pant legs are soaked. 

Hannibal turns to carry D up the steps, and because his back is now to the pool he doesn’t see what D, looking over Hannibal’s shoulder with tear-blurred eyes, sees - Will turning back to wade into the water to approach the bigger boy. 

“Is he okay?” the boy asks, the fear in his voice stark. “I didn’t mean -” but then Will is on him, and he has time to let out half a yelp before Will bangs his head against the side of the pool and pushes him under the water. 

When Hannibal rises from the pool and tries to sit D down, panic makes him cling harder, and it takes perhaps thirty seconds for Hannibal to disentangle himself.

Hannibal spins back towards the commotion, where the bigger boy’s friends are trying, without much luck, to pull Will off him. There are other adults there, too, but Hannibal slips past them and bends to snag Will under his arms and hauls him, kicking and screaming, from the water. 

He goes still as death as soon as Hannibal puts him down on the walkway. D runs to Will and tangles his arms around his waist, and feels his brother’s body begin to shiver so violently that it seems to be trying to shudder itself to pieces.

Hannibal looks down on them and says, in a low voice that brooks no arguments, “Go back to the suite, the both of you.”

Then he turns away from them and says, in a tone as different as day from night, “Let me see him, please. I’m a doctor.”

Will and D do as they’re told. 


	8. Chapter 8

Will and D go up the suite and sit on their bed. 

Will is breathing strangely, and though he is leaning over himself with his arms curled over his middle like he has a belly ache, D can see the way the short and shallow grasps make his chest rise and fall. It reminds D of a hurt bird he saw once, the desperate way it fluttered its unbroken wing as it tried to fly away. 

He sits that way for what feels to D to be a very long time, and when he can’t stand the silence anymore D reaches out and shakes him by the shoulder. 

“Is he going to hit you?” D asks. “Will? Should we run away?”

D’s eyes are still watering from the reeking burn of the water that invaded his sinuses, and when Will tilts his head to the side to glance briefly at D he sees that Will’s eyes are wet too.

“Leave me alone,” he says. 

“Oh,” D says, and lets his hand fall. 

He sits beside Will, hands twitching fretfully, but then idea strikes D, and he gets up in a hurry and heads for the kitchen. 

The knife block is too high up for D to reach it, but he’s good at climbing, and it isn’t hard for him to get up on the counter and draw a knife from the block. He sits the blade on the counter, climbs down, then picks it up again and heads down the hallway for Will. 

He’s never used a knife on anybody, but he knows that they can be, and has a pretty good idea how. 

On the way back to the bedroom, D catches his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. 

He veers into the bathroom and comes to a slow stop in front of the mirror. 

Without planning to do so, and without any conscious awareness of the emotions driving his actions, he picks a tumbler off the counter and bashes it against the glass. 

  
  


When Will hears the glass break he hauls himself up from the bed to see what happened. 

He feels frozen inside himself, too numbed by the tremulous emotions roiling under his skin to properly differentiate any of them, but when he sees what D has in his hand fear breaches the surface and takes over. 

That fear pulls anger out after it, and he demands, “What the hell are you doing with that?” It’s hard, with everything that has happened, to keep from taking the smaller boy by the shoulders and shaking him. 

Instead, he catches D by the forearm and with his other hand pries his fingers back to take the knife. 

“Don’t be mad, Will,” D whines. “You’re hurting me.”

There’s a moment, stunning in its nightmarish clarity, where Will sees in his mind’s eye everything that might have befallen the boy if on the day D’s family was waylaid Will hadn’t gotten to him before his uncles did, and beneath the too-tight grip he still has on D’s arm Will can swear he feels the skin crackle and burn like the flesh of a roasting piglet, the heat of it enough to blister Will’s hand. 

Will lets go. 

He wants to tell D that he’s sorry, and he wants to explain all the reasons why seeing D with the knife frightened him so badly, but Will’s tongue feels dead in his mouth and he cannot form words. 

Instead, he turns for the kitchen. 

Will reaches up to put the knife back into the block, and that’s when the card reader on the other side of the door clicks and Hannibal steps into the suite. 

The knife is still in Will’s hand, and Will supposes that he knows how that looks to Hannibal, and that makes him frantic with fear of how Hannibal will take it, and that fear remakes a potential misunderstanding into reality, and instead of putting the knife away and then making up some pretext for why he had it Will brandishes the blade at him. 

Taking the knife away from Will is not a difficult task, given that the boy has no real commitment to using it on him. 

When Hannibal advances towards Will, moving neither slowly nor hurrying, the boy retreats backwards until he comes up against the counter. 

Hannibal takes one final step closer, In unknowing imitation of how Will disarmed D only minutes before he grasps Will by the forearm, just above the juncture of his elbow, and curls his own hand around the one that is holding the knife.

Then he waits, patiently, for Will to relinquish the weapon. 

When he does, Hannibal returns it to its rightful place, and then he turns back to the boys and says, “Will, sit down at the table.”

Will doesn’t seem to hear him - appears too lost inside his own head to be processing much of anything that is happening around him. The fear stink in the air now is worse than any of the smells the boys brought down off the mountain with them, and conscious that if he makes a wrong move either or both of them might explode in feral raging terror, Hannibal places one hand on Will’s upper arm and presses the other gently between his shoulder blades, and turns Will in the direction of the table. 

“Sit down,” he says again, and this time Will moves forward and does as asked. 

“We won’t be staying in this hotel any longer,” Hannibal tells them. “I’ve arranged for different lodgings.”

He looks to D. “Go and gather up all of your and Will’s belongings and sit them neatly on the bed for me, please. I would like to pack up quickly, and that will be of great help.”

“Will?” D says, and the question is seeped in uncertain panic.

“It’s alright,” Will tells him, flatly. “Go on and do what he told you.”

After a moment’s hesitation, D turns and does so. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized recently that I don't think I ever stated D's age. 
> 
> That leaves me curious - How old does he read as being to you guys?


	9. Chapter 9

Hannibal fills a glass with water from the purifier jug and sits it on the table in front of Will. Next to the glass he places a small sky-blue pill. 

“I’d like for you to take this,” Hannibal tells him. 

“What is it?”

“Valium. It will help you calm down.”

Will has gotten used to swallowing pills, though Hannibal needed to explain to him how it was done. He was on prescription painkillers for a few days after the car accident, and has been taking Tylenol since.

Will picks the pill up and swallows it. 

Hannibal pats him lightly on the shoulder before turning away. It should take about twenty minutes for the valium to kick in, and in the meantime Hannibal busies himself making tea. 

Putting the kettle (which he had delivered here to make up for the suite’s lack of one) on the stove, Hannibal then reaches into the cupboards to take down the tea and two cups. Hannibal hums to himself a little as he does this, but he’s listening closely to know if Will gets up from the table. 

When the tea is ready, Hannibal places one cup in front of Will, and then sits down at the other side of the table with his own. 

“Chamomile with lavender,” Hannibal says, and suggests, “Breathe it in, Will. The scent alone is soothing.”

Privately, Hannibal has more faith in the medicinal benefits of diazepam than he does herbal remedies, but Will needs more than a sedative. He needs to feel secure and grounded, and the reality of the cup in his hands and the warmth it provides and the knowledge that it was made specially for him all in their little ways aid towards that. 

“I think that I made a mistake,” he tells Will, with what is essentially honesty, and watches Will’s face closely to see how he takes it. 

The boys were making good progress, and over the last several days Hannibal put a lot of thought into the safest venue to test is their abilities to socialize with others. 

He’d considered the possibility of taking them to the hotel restaurant, on a walk down the street, or to a department store, but rejected each option in turn. The latter two possibilities contained more variables that could be easily managed, and the unpredictability of crowd behavior and the boys’ reaction to it especially worried him, and furthermore if things went badly it extricating them from the situation might prove difficult. 

The restaurant downstairs was closer to the closed-off safety of their suite, but it presented its own problems. Hannibal has put some time into helping them improve their table manners, which had previously been nonexistent, but though Will has a natural talent for mimicry that makes it easy for him to imitate anything Hannibal shows him, D is still struggling to learn how to use silverware. Further, the fissure in his lip and the absent row of upper incisors cause him to have difficulties with chewing.  These issues do not trouble Hannibal, especially given that they will eventually be resolved, but he would not have liked for them to be subjected to negative attention that might have discouraged D or angered Will. 

The pool, in contrast, seemed a much better option. This early in the season it was almost empty, and it seemed likely that the scattered patrons would keep to themselves. If anyone did approach the boys they would do so individually or in small groups, and Hannibal expected to be able to intervene if the interaction became too challenging for D or Will to manage on their own.

But Will proved to be shockingly quick to violence, even by Hannibal’s own standards, and with his wounded gut and D tangled in his arms Hannibal was not able to step in and take control of the situation as briskly as he would have liked to have done. 

Hannibal continues, “You’re responsible for your own actions, Will, but I know also that a tremendous amount of change has been thrown at you in less than a week. I should have managed the situation better.”

Will sits with that in silence for a little while. 

He does feel calmer now, though his head is a little foggy, and he can  _ almost _ grok the subtext of what Hannibal is saying. 

“You hung back because you were waiting to see what I’d do,” he says, less as an accusation than a statement of fact. 

“I can’t keep the two of you locked in these rooms forever. I wanted to see how you would do out among other people, so I’d have a clearer picture of what to do next.”

“I’m not sorry I did that,” Will says. “You aren’t going to trick me into feeling sorry about it.”

Hannibal doesn’t rise to the bait. 

“What were you thinking,” he asks instead, “when you did it?” Hannibal doesn’t sound like he’s angry. He seems simply curious. 

“I wasn’t thinking much,” Will says, straining towards honesty. “Just seeing red. But as much as I was thinking it was something like, ‘D’s safe with you now, so I can go and take care of business.’”

“You didn’t waste any time.” 

Will shrugs that off. “Are they going to bring the law down on us?”

“I don’t think so,” Hannibal says. 

“Why not?”

“I have a talent for convincing people,” he tells Will. Then, after a moment he adds, “Funds may have also changed hands.”

“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” Will says, returning to his argument like a dog to an old bone. It hadn’t, in fact, occurred to Will that he’d done anything he shouldn’t have until Hannibal pulled him out of the water and sent him back to his room. “And I don’t think that you think I did wrong, either.”

“I’m not looking for expressions of guilt, Will. Just a little foresight. A bit of consideration of the risks before you undertake a course of action. 

“Perhaps,” he adds, and there’s a ghost of something like a smile on Hannibal’s lips now, “a sense of proportion.”

“I don’t understand you,” Will says, but he feels less afraid now, and that isn’t just the pill; Hannibal isn’t going to hurt him - not over this anyway, and not today.

“The nuance of it doesn’t matter at the moment,” Hannibal says, waving that away. “What I’m telling you is that it’s fine to get even, on occasion, but don’t get caught. 

"There’s a host of moral and practical reasons why attempting to drown another child in front of ten witnesses and a set of security cameras isn’t a wise course of action.”

“Never mind that,” Will says, angry all over again. “He dunked D on purpose.” 

“Do you really think so? Are you sure?”

The question hits Will like a blow. 

He looks inside himself, trying to find an answer. 

“No,” he admits finally, but it comes out as barely a whisper. 

All over again his throat is getting tight and tears are burning in his eyes, and he pounds the side of his fist against the table in frustration and says again, “No. 

“I’m not, and that’s the goddamn problem. I don’t know who is and isn’t out to get him. I can’t tell. 

“It feels like almost everybody we’ve seen goes cold or gets nervous or turns nasty when they see his face, but maybe I’m wrong about that and there’s something else that’s making them look at him like that, or maybe most of them are acting just fine and I’m on such a hair trigger that I’m imagining it. 

“I don’t think I am, though - not most of the time, at least - because D’s catching onto it too. They’re being ugly about the way he looks and talks and D’s seeing that and it’s hurting him.”

Hannibal asks, “Did he break the mirror on purpose?”

Will hesitates. It’s bad enough to have to wait and see what Hannibal might punish him for, but he doesn’t want to tell on D if it might bring trouble down on him. 

The lack of an answer is as good as a confirmation. 

“I thought he might have.”

“I should have been watching him,” Will says. “If you’re going to give somebody a whooping for it you whoop me,” but he’s just doing his duty. For now, at least, Will has faith that Hannibal isn’t going to hurt either of them. 

Hannibal does not allow himself to be sidetracked by offering reassurances. 

“I need you to understand this, Will, and I need you to bear it in mind no matter what happens; If the authorities decide that you are dangerous, and  _ especially _ if they decide that you are dangerous in a way which I can’t control or correct, then they will take you away from me and they will take D away from us both.”

The fear that the pill drove down suddenly comes flowing back into Will’s belly, filling him with a nauseous dread. 

“There are a number of things that I can shield you from,” Hannibal goes on, “and more importantly I can teach you how to protect yourself, but if you’d killed that boy, or even injured him badly enough to send him to the hospital, there’s little I could do to spare you the consequences. 

“You have to be careful - we all have to be careful - especially until the legal situation is cleared up and we’re all safely in Baltimore.”

“Okay,” Will says, around the lump in his throat. 

“I’m not trying to frighten you,” Hannibal tells him. “I know that you’re doing your best.”

He stands up, and Will sees the pain in him as he does, if only because Hannibal allows it to be visible, the way the arrow wound still hurts him. Will wants to do something to help him with that, but can’t think of how to ask what he needs. 

“This was much too soon,” Hannibal says, picking up the original thread of the conversation. “Not just the pool but this hotel itself. 

“We’re going to try somewhere different - something a little more familiar for you, and rather more isolated.”

A few hours later, they arrive at Wolf Creek Lodge and check into their cabin. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone who answered my question about D's age. 
> 
> I'd intended him to be about seven, give or take a year, so it was really nice to learn that's how people were reading him. <3


End file.
